Archive for the 'Make Mine Marvel' Category

I posted the original Bob Larkin cover art on Facebook last week. Here’s some original Dave Cockrum art from the same issue. You can read the whole comic—written by Roger McKenzie and illustrated by Ernie Colón—at Alberto’s Flickr. It’s good stuff, and there are lots of extras.

Bonus: here’s a photo of some 1978 kids transfixed by the oversized beauty.

So very interesting. Steve Ditko created the Dr. Strange character in the early ’60s, and Stan Lee introduced the “Master of Black Magic” in Strange Tales #110 (1963). The Ditko/Lee creation was a reflection of the uncanny times, a generation’s embrace of all things mystical and occult. Here Irons simultaneously appropriates the Marvel “property” (there is no mention of the company or the character name) while emulating Ditko’s style and the spirit of his and Lee’s Sorcerer Supreme. Irons did at least three posters for Space Age.

Thundarr was #1. Spidey was #2. I always wondered: what happened to all those ice bridges after the friends beat the bad guys and went back to Aunt May’s? It’s better not to think about the answer as an adult.

Starcruiser was a series proposed in the late 1970s by Gerry Anderson about “an ultra-modern house where a mother, father, and two kids lived. At the touch of a button the house would literally fold into a spaceship. The family would travel around the universe from planet to planet… ” (See here for source and more background.) The series never made it to the air, obviously, but a comic strip of the same name appeared in UK’s Look-In magazine from 1977 to 1979. The writer and author of the strip was David Jefferis, who was working on Usborne’s World of the Unknown and World of the Future series at the same time. (My interview with Mr. Jefferis will run next month.) Airfix’s gorgeous model (1979) was based on the strip.

I interrupt my holiday programming to bring you the worst Spider-Man poster anybody has ever seen. It was given away during an early stamp book promotion—a year before the Value Stamps were introduced in 1974. Extremely rare, according to seller Marvel Museum, and also extremely hideous.

“Marvel Comics yearly reach an incredible 77% of all kids in the United States between 6 and 17.” I have to believe there’s some padding going on, but still, that’s a big number, and I don’t doubt it. Bringing a comic book to school would buy you a class full of friends for a day.

Star-Lord’s second costume. You’ll notice that the original painting, posted at Comic Art Fans, has only Norem’s signature. The final cover has a second signature: Peter Ledger. I don’t see any differences between the two pieces, though Ledger presumably added some additional colors. Ledger also shared credit with Norem on the outstanding cover of The Hulk! #15.

Tales of the Zombie (1973 – 1975) ran for 10 issues and an annual. Boris Vallejo did the first four covers, and Earl Norem did the rest. You can see them all at the Marvel Wikia.

Norem was a much better all-around artist, in my opinion, even though Vallejo is the one who became famous. Norem could paint anything, electrify and dramatize any scene (see the falling flashlight and erupting chunks of earth above), catch the details (rain-soaked leaves sucked through a thrown open door, the textures of leather, denim, clean hair, dirty hair). Boris, on the other hand, was a one-trick pony. What he did he usually did well, but never as well as his master, Frazetta.